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on some snapshots of Lorie from her late teens, dancing on tabletops, kissing her girlfriends. Things girls did when they were drinking and someone had a camera.
    In those shots, Lorie was always posing, vamping, trying to look like a model, a celebrity. It was a Lorie before he really knew her, a Lorie from what she called her “wild girl days.”
    But in this picture she didn’t seem to be aware of the camera at all, seemed to be lost in the thrall of whatever music was playing, whatever sounds she was hearing in her crowded head. Her eyes were shut tight, her head thrown back, her neck long and brown and beautiful.
    She looked happier than he had ever seen her.
    A Lorie from long ago, or never.
    But when he scrolled further down, he saw the halter top riding up her body, saw the pop of a hip bone. Saw the elegant script letters:
Mirame quemar
.
     
    That night he remembered a story she had told him long ago. It seemed impossible he’d forgotten it. Or maybe it just seemed different now, making it seem like something new. Something uncovered, an old sunken box you find in the basement smelling strong and you’re afraid to open it.
    It was back when they were dating, when her roommate was always around and they had no place to be alone. They would have thrilling bouts in his car, and she loved to crawl into the back seat and lie back, hoisting a leg high over the headrest and begging him for it.
    It was after the first or second time, back when it was all so crazy and confusing and his head pounding and starbursting, that Lorie curled against him and talked and talked about her life, and the time she stole four Revlon eyeslicks from CVS and how she had slept with a soggy-eared stuffed animal named Ears until she was twelve. She said she felt she could tell him anything.
    Somewhere in the blur of those nights—nights when he too told her private things, stories about babysitter crushes and shoplifting Matchbox cars—that she told him the story.
    How, when she was seven, her baby brother was born and she became so jealous.
    “My mom spent all her time with him, and left me alone all day,” she said. “So I hated him. Every night I would pray that he would be taken away. That something awful would happen to him. At night I’d sneak over to his crib and stare at him through the little bars. I think maybe I figured I could think it into happening. If I stared at him long enough and hard enough, it might happen.”
    He had nodded, because this is how kids could be, he guessed. He was the youngest and wondered if his older sister thought things like this about him. Once she smashed his finger under a cymbal and said it was an accident.
    But she wasn’t done with her story and she snuggled closer to him and he could smell her powdery body and he thought of all its little corners and arcs, how he liked to find them with his hands, all the soft, hot places on her. Sometimes it felt like her body was never the same body, like it changed under his hands.
I’m a witch, a witch
.
    “So one night,” she said, her voice low and sneaky, “I was watching him through the crib bars and he was making this funny noise.”
    Her eyes glittered in the dark of the car.
    “I leaned across, sticking my hands through the rails,” she said, snaking her hand toward him. “And that’s when I saw this piece of string dangling on his chin, from his pull toy. I starting pulling it, and pulling it.”
    He watched her tugging the imaginary string, her eyes getting bigger and bigger.
    “Then he let out this gasp,” she said, “and started breathing again.”
    She paused, her tongue clicking.
    “My mom came in at just that moment. She said I saved his life,” she said. “Everyone did. She bought me a new jumper and the hot-pink shoes I wanted. Everyone loved me.”
    A pair of headlights flashed across them and he saw her eyes, bright and brilliant.
    “So no one ever knew the real story,” she said. “I’ve never told anyone.”
    She